Virtual office assistant

source Screenshot If you’ve ever wondered what the next phase of working remotely could be like, look no further than eXp Realty. In most respects, eXp is your typical real estate brokerage company. It employs thousands of licensed agents to help clients buy and sell their homes. And business seems to be good: eXp’s stock price has almost quadrupled since this time last year, giving it a market cap of over $610 million. What sets it apart is that, rather than having agents stop by a physical office for meetings, presentations, or technical assistance, the company’s 8,000 employees go to work on a virtual island. A small office in Bellingham, WA serves as its headquarters because of “a legal requirement,” the company says, but the real work gets done in the digital realm. The company says that maintaining a virtual office gives it some advantages. “We found that we have an ability that’s hard to find in the physical … [Read more...] about This $610 million real estate company doesn’t have an office for its 8,000 employees — instead, everybody works from this completely virtual island

With the rapid rise of voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, comScore predicts that by 2020, fifty per cent of all internet searches will be made by voice. While the average person can type forty words per minute, they can speak up to 150. According to Ventana Research SVP and research director David Menninger, 2018 will be the year that voice and natural language interfaces become mainstream.“For decades, the man-machine interface has been based on keyboard and mouse interactions,” says Menninger. “We’ve learned to use these devices, but neither is natural to us, and as a result, it restricts the audience for various technology initiatives including analytics and business intelligence.”“As devices of all types allow users to leverage language, we will see adoption of related types of technology among a broader audience. This is particularly relevant for analytics initiatives which have traditionally struggled to reach widespread and regular … [Read more...] about Virtual assistants: The Veruca Salt approach to business

The smash hit Farmville should be available for download from iTunes starting today. The Facebook time waster marks its first anniversary this week, and has some 75 mln followers. One interesting tidbit we have read about the game is that, in just a year, it has become the most popular computer game worldwide. We have also heard stories from relatives that their bosses require the employees to maintain the farms of people on vacation as a team building exercise.Highly addictive as it is for bored government workers and office clerks alike, Farmville on the iPhone is even greater threat to productivity. Mark Pincus, Zynga's CEO, has made a sure bet that milking the virtual cows and growing cocoa with friends will be a favorite pastime for young and old who rush to buy the new iPhone 4. source: BusinessInsider … [Read more...] about Farmville for iPhone coming today, office assistants worldwide rejoice

Virtual personal assistants are ubiquitous across all three major smartphone platforms: iOS has Siri, Android has Google Now, and Windows Phone has Cortana. But while there’s some overlap, only Apple has all three now that the good folks in Redmond have ported their Windows-only service to both iPhone and Android. While there are subtle differences, all of them essentially do the same thing: Make it easier to get information and find stuff with your voice. A hybrid of Siri and Google Now’s card-based concept, Cortana 1.3 has a few interesting tricks up her sleeve, but is there any compelling reason to choose this app over what’s already baked into iOS? I spent a week with Microsoft’s newest iPhone app in an effort to definitively answer this question, and the answer appears to be no, at least for now—Cortana is simply too limited in its current incarnation, although PC users will benefit since the service is also on Windows 10. Hey, Cortana The youngest … [Read more...] about Cortana for iPhone review: Siri has little to fear from Microsoft’s virtual assistant

On Friday, we told you about a closed app in the Windows Phone Store called Work Assistant. Since the app is closed and cannot be installed yet, we had to rely on speculation to determine that the Work Assistant app is designed to integrate Cortana with the new touch-first Office apps coming to Windows 10 for Phones. Most Windows Phone users feel that it isn't right that iOS and Android devices have better and more functional apps for Office considering that the suite and Windows Phone both are Microsoft products. The Windows 10 for Phones version of the Office apps will reportedly change that way of thinking.Now, a video has been posted that shows the Work Assistant app getting opened by Cortana. The voice-activated virtual personal assistant also fetches Office-related files from your phone, OneDrive, One Drive for Business, your PC and SharePoint. The video shows Cortana grabbing a file and shooting it off via email using Outlook.Right now the app is believed to be undergoing … [Read more...] about Closed Work Assistant app appears on video starring Cortana